Shooting Methods for Fractional Dirichlet-Type Boundary Value Problems of Order $α\in (1,2)$ With Caputo Derivatives

Abstract: For the numerical solution of Dirichlet-type boundary value problems associated to nonlinear fractional differential equations of order $\alpha \in (1,2)$ that use Caputo derivatives, we suggest to employ shooting methods. In particular, we demonstrate that the so-called proportional secting technique for selecting the required initial values leads to numerical schemes that converge to high accuracy in a very small number of shooting iterations, and we provide an explanation of the analytical background for this favourable numerical behaviour.